Google has released four spam updates so far in 2026. If you run a small business website in Sussex, the chances are you didn’t notice any of them, and that’s usually a good sign. If your traffic fell sharply this year and you don’t know why, though, it’s time to look closer.
The 2026 Spam Updates So Far
According to Google’s Search Status Dashboard, these are the spam updates this year:
- The March 2026 spam update started on 24 March and took under a day to roll out.
- The June 2026 spam update started on 24 June and took around two days.
- The August 2026 spam update started on 18 August and took under three days.
- The September 2026 spam update started on 24 September, and Google said it could take up to two weeks.
Google hasn’t said what any of these updates targeted. It only confirmed that they apply globally and to all languages. So treat anyone who claims to know the exact target of a particular update with a pinch of salt. What we can do is check our sites against the spam policies Google has published.
What Google Counts as Spam
Google’s spam policies cover a long list of tactics. These are the ones most relevant to small business websites:
- Scaled content abuse is publishing lots of pages mainly to manipulate rankings, whether they’re written by people, AI or a mix of both.
- Doorway pages are near-identical pages built to rank for slightly different searches, such as one page per town with the place name swapped.
- Link spam covers buying links, swapping links in bulk or using links that exist only to pass ranking value.
- Site reputation abuse is hosting third-party content on a trusted site so that it ranks off the back of that site’s reputation.
- Expired domain abuse is buying an old domain and filling it with low-value content to borrow its history.
What Happens When It Goes Wrong
We worked with a fabric company that had hundreds of blog posts. Many were thin, some duplicated each other and plenty didn’t answer the question in the title. The traffic dropped off a cliff.
The lesson wasn’t “stop blogging”. It was that every page on your site has to earn its place.
A hundred weak posts don’t add up to one strong one.
Spam updates and core updates are different things, by the way. Spam updates deal with policy breaches. Core updates reassess how helpful and reliable your content is compared with everyone else’s. A site with lots of thin content can get caught by either, which is why it pays to fix the content instead of guessing which update caused the drop.
What Sussex Businesses Should Check
Here’s a checklist to run on your own site:
- Look for pages that exist only to target a keyword or a town and say little that’s unique.
- Check whether any blog posts overlap so heavily that they compete with each other.
- Read your oldest posts and ask whether they still answer the question in the title.
- Review where your links come from, and be wary of any you paid for or swapped in bulk.
- Make sure any content written with AI has been checked, edited and improved by someone who knows the subject.
What to Do If You’ve Been Hit
Google’s guidance is to fix the problem, not to chase the update.
That means removing or improving thin pages, merging duplicates and cleaning up any link schemes. Google also says it can take months for its systems to recognise the improvements, so this is a long game.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your site, you can see how we work on Sussex local SEO here.
A common problem on local business sites is a set of town pages that look suspiciously alike. In the next post, we explain the difference between useful town pages and doorway pages.